Advertisement

Billion-pixel space camera will be "most powerful ever"

The billion-pixel sensor in the £630 million ($958m) Gaia spacecraft dwarfs any ever launched into space - and will peer at our own galaxy through two telescopes to “see” in 3D.

Gaia will map the stars of the Milky Way

It is the most powerful digital camera ever launched into space -  on a mission to map a billion stars, and build the first 3D map of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

The billion-pixel sensor in the £630 million ($958m) Gaia spacecraft dwarfs any ever launched - and will peer at other suns in our own galaxy through two telescopes. 

The sensor is made from 106 separate CCD sensors - similar to the ones found in digital cameras - each smaller than a credit card and thinner than a human hair.

Gaia will detect stars a million times fainter than ones visible to the human eye - and could pick out previously unseen asteroids in our own solar system, as well as planets orbiting distant stars.

The machine recently completed its final preparations - and is now being transported to French Guiana for launch on a Soyuz rocket this year.

[Related: Space Station experiment finds "new kind of flame"]


The telescope will orbit for five years and map the position of a billion stars, roughly 1% of the stars in our galaxy. It will be the most accurate map of the Milky Way ever made.

Gaia could reveal how our galaxy formed - and whether it is on a collision course with our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy.

It will map the stars from an orbit around the Sun, about 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit. It will spin slowly, repeatedly measuring the position of each star to build its map.

Gaia will also test Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity by watching how light is deflected by massive objects like the Sun and its planets, as well as other stars.

“Gaia will be ESA’s discovery machine,” says Alvaro Giménez, ESA’s Director of Science and Robotic Exploration.

“It will tell us what our home Galaxy is made of and how it was put together in greater detail than ever before.”